How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Florida District Courts of Appeal / Joined 2004 / Served to 2011

Maura T. Smith

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Maura T. Smith was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 2004. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2004–2011 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2004	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 3 published opinions for the court (2004–2007). Most cited: Bentz v. McDaniel (6 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 1 of these was attributed to Smith by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
2004	Bentz v. McDaniel	872 So. 2d 978	6
2007	Adam v. VERSAILLES SUR LA MER CONDOMINIUM	973 So. 2d 466	1
2007	Friend v. Deutsche Bank Trust Co.†	964 So. 2d 171	0

Showing the 3 most-cited of 3 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Maura T. Smith on?: Maura T. Smith was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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7 years on the Florida District Courts of Appeal. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).